The major focus of the laboratory

Human Physical Appearance

We are a forensic genetics laboratory based at Indiana University Indianapolis (IUI). The laboratory and our research is focused on genes and the biological processes linked to human physical appearance, with a final application for Forensic and Anthropological fields.

Ancestry inference

We explore both autosomal and Y chromosomal DNA testing. For the paternal lineages, we investigate surname correlations as a type of genetic genealogy project that enables individual’s to trace back a male lineage or timeline of a surname to a common ancestor. We are currently interested in Ireland and surnames associated with old Irish Clan names and Viking influences.

We also try to find additional ancestry informative markers (AIMs) for the populations we are exploring within our research dataset and test these markers for inclusion on existing assay designs using those in addition to the 1000 genomes project data and the HGDP (Human Genome Diversity Project) sample sets.